CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Before she ever started, some guy from Nevada leaped to his feet, started chanting Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and damned near knocked me down. Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for Senate from Massachusetts, one of the few unquestioned superstars who came out of the right side of the great Wall Street pilferage that nearly shattered the world economy, and already beloved by almost everyone in the hall purely as a concept, stood there as a real human being and began her speech into the teeth of what seemed like applause she had earned somewhere else.

I'm Elizabeth Warren, and this is my first Democratic convention.

She still seems more like an idea of a candidate than she does an actual person competing for a very high elected political office in her very first try at any elected political office at all. There's a lot of blather coming from some superannuated Hibernians back in the Commonwealth (God save it!) about how she's not "connecting" with the studly blue-collar men the way that comes so naturally to Scott Brown, but that's coming mostly from guys who still don't understand why they're not young rising congressmen any more. She had a rough time at one forum fielding questions from a former public-radio host named Christopher Lydon, whose love for the sound of his own voice is more profound than any love of our time. People kept waiting for Elizabeth Warren to become a politician, and that happened at the Democratic convention last night. She gave a good, tough, purely political speech. Oh, she certainly told her personal story, and she talked about moms and kids and even about her "Daddy." But, once she got rolling, she gave Willard Romney as severe a hiding as he's gotten all week from anyone who isn't Bill Clinton or a Nun On A Bus.

And she was at her most effective when she worked away at the audience in her soft, sincere tones, which did not always reach all the way to the back of the hall, before getting to the stinger. It was like listening to your grandmother, reading you softly to sleep, until you suddenly realize she's talking about eating somebody's heart in the marketplace.

I'm here tonight to talk about hard-working people: people who get up early, stay up late, cook dinner and help out with homework; people who can be counted on to help their kids, their parents, their neighbors, and the lady down the street whose car broke down; people who work their hearts out but are up against a hard truth — the game is rigged against them.

That's it. That's why Elizabeth Warren became a star long before she became a politician, and even longer before she became a candidate. That's why people in Washington worked so very hard to keep her from getting a job she'd practically invented. When the thieves and sharpers nearly blew up the world, there were very few people who stood up and yelled that the dice were loaded, the wheel crooked, and there was no pea under any of the shells. The game is rigged against them. Wall Street is not a boulevard of golden dreams. Wall Street is not the pathway to riches and a place where all the American dreams come true. Wall Street is a casino, more crooked than most, and populated by grifters who'd steal soup from a blind beggar. If Warren wins, it will be because she was willing to say this when a lot of other people were not.

And, again, oozing empathy, she spoke with a kind of rueful awe at the magnitude of the folly and waste and corruption that still seems to amaze her to this day. There are still priests who are surprised by sin. There are still cops who are shocked by human depravity. And there are still people who can be amazed at just how much was stolen out from under the country, and from whom it was stolen, and how completely unrepentant the thieves remain.

People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part — they're right. The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in subsidies. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. Wall Street CEOs — the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs — still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.

And Elizabeth Warren was not at all reluctant to place the Republican nominee squarely in the heart of that folly and waste and corruption, not because he necessarily partook in the worst of it, but because it is within that universe of sharp practices and clever dodges that Willard Romney claims to have found the real heart of American enterprise, as though the credit-default swap is the new Model-T Ford, as though the creation of new and complicated financial instruments is something that Edison would have gotten around to, if he'd have been born into wealth in the 1940's.

Anyone here have a problem with that? Well I do. I talk to small business owners all across Massachusetts. Not one of them — not one — made big bucks from the risky Wall Street bets that brought down our economy. I talk to nurses and programmers, salespeople and firefighters — people who bust their tails every day. Not none of them — not one — stashes their money in the Cayman Islands to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

This is the way a Democratic politician talks at a Democratic convention when she is supporting the re-election of a Democratic president. No, Warren's not running against Romney. She's running against Scott Brown, who is not Willard Romney, not born in any way to privilege, and who, judging from all his ads, isn't even running as a Republican. But last night, she seemed to embrace being a national figure running in a statewide contest, and she seemed to appreciate the power and opportunity that might come from the knowledge that what she learned in Washington — the game is rigged — might apply in Malden or Worcester.

The Republican vision is clear: "I've got mine, the rest of you are on your own." Republicans say they don't believe in government. Sure they do. They believe in government to help themselves and their powerful friends. After all, Mitt Romney's the guy who said corporations are people. No, Governor Romney, corporations are not people. People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they cry, they dance. They live, they love, and they die. And that matters. That matters because we don't run this country for corporations, we run it for people. And that's why we need Barack Obama.

A politician said that. Still a rookie politician, certainly. (She talked through her rising applause, so the full effect of that passage was rather lost, but every other speaker last night knew Bill Clinton was batting clean-up, and they all talked as though there was a stopwatch clacking away in their heads.) But a politician growing comfortable with politics. That guy in Nevada can't vote for her, not even in the Commonwealth, where we're a little looser on such things, but he saw it as clearly as anyone. Elizabeth Warren is becoming less of an idea and more of a person, and a formidable one for all that. She is not the issue. The rigging of the game is the issue.